Thirty years had come and gone since England had been alarmed, irritated, or encouraged, according to the temper of its political inhabitants, by a Jacobite rising. The personality of James Stuart, the Old Pretender, was little more than a memory among those clansmen who had rallied round the royal standard at Braemar. In those thirty years James Stuart had lived his melancholy, lonely, evil life of exile, the hanger-on of foreign courts, the half grotesque, half pitiable, sham monarch of a sham court, that was always ready to be moved from place to place, with all its cheaply regal accessaries, like the company and the properties of some band of strolling players. Now there was a new Stuart in the field, a new sham prince, a "Young Pretender." After the disasters of the Fifteen, James Stuart had become the hero of as romantic a love-story as ever wandering prince experienced. He had fallen in love, in the hot, unreasoning Stuart way, with the beautiful Clementine Sobieski, and the beautiful Clementine had returned the passion of the picturesquely unfortunate prince, and they had carried on their love affairs under conditions of greater difficulty than Romeo and Juliet, and had overcome the difficulties and got married, and in 1720 Clementine had borne to the House of Stuart a son and heir. Every precaution was taken to insure the most public recognition of the existence of the newly born prince. It was determined that none of the perplexity, the uncertainty, the suspicion, which attended upon the birth of James, should be permitted to arise now. There must be no _haro_ about warming-pans, no accusations of {200} juggling, no possible doubts as to the right of the new-born babe to be regarded as the son of James Stuart and of Clementine Sobieski. The birth took place in Rome, and cardinals accredited from all the great Powers of Europe were present on the occasion to bear witness to it. The city was alive with such excitement as it had seldom witnessed since the days when pagan Rome became papal Rome. The streets in the vicinity of the house where Clementine Sobieski lay in her pain were choked with the gilt carriages of the proudest Italian nobility; princes of the Church and princes of royal blood thronged the antechambers. Gallant gentlemen who bore some of the stateliest names of England and of Scotland waited on the stair-ways for the tidings that a new prince was given unto their loyalty. Adventurous soldiers of fortune kicked their heels in the court-yard, and thought with moistened eyes of the toasts they would drink to their future king. From the Castle of St. Angelo, where long ago the besieged had hurled upon the besiegers the statues that had proved the taste of a Roman emperor, where Rienzi lay yesterday, and where Cagliostro shall lie to-morrow, thunders of artillery saluted the advent of the new rose of the House of Stuart.